Which is the least nutritious fruit?

Cucumber! Yes, cucumber is a fruit – and that too, not a very nutritious one. If you also thought replacing your heavy, hearty lunch with cucumber was benefiting you in any sense other than just feeding you with water content, you are not alone. 

Botanists term a fruit as the part of the plant that bears the seeds. In other words, fruits are the parts or means through which plants reproduce or spread their specie. Moreover, fruits, as compared to vegetables, grow out of the plant flowers. Cucumbers fit into all the categories required for it to be termed as a fruit – it grows from the flowering part and has seeds for plant reproduction. 

Most of the people prefer having a salad bowl made of fresh vegetables such as cucumbers and carrots instead of a quick sandwich. Fresh fruits and vegetables are amazing for your health – no denying in that. However, the issue of cucumbers is a little tricky. Cucumbers are fruits that are immensely high in water content. It is as if you have had loads of water added to your body along with a minimal amount of calories and nutritious content. 

A kilogram of cucumber has merely 130 calories, and hardly any minerals and vitamin C. Cucumbers are low-calorie fruit. This is where the tricky part is. Since they are less in calories, they are considered a healthy alternative by most of the people. It is widely used in weight-loss plans as well. However, this fruit, with 96.3% water, does not provide us with any significant amount of nutrients. 

Therefore, cucumber is not only a less-calorie fruit but also the least nutritious too. It does have some amount of essential minerals such as potassium, magnesium, and manganese along with vitamin C, but they are present in such little amount that it is almost insignificant to consider. This is why nutrients stress the fact that cucumbers are the low-calorie fruits that provide less than 5 percent of the daily requirement of the essential minerals and vitamins present in them.

Weight-loss plans based majorly on cucumbers is considered quite ineffective in the long run by the experts. Replacing cucumbers with other nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables is not a wise decision as cucumbers do not help you meet the daily requirement of your body. Thus, a cucumber weight loss plan is considered very restrictive and a hazard to health as it discourages the consumption of other healthy and nutritious fruits and vegetables.   

A British chef once described a recipe, keeping in mind the nutrition value of cucumber: “First peel the cucumber, cut it into nearly 4 millimeter thick slices, arrange these slices in a serving dish, pour a little vinegar on it, and then throw them out of the window. Why eat a cucumber instead of a cake, when hungry?”

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